Abstract
The aim of this chapter is to study the relationship between subjective well-being (SWB) and two institutional factors—trust and democracy—in Latin America. Previous literature has demonstrated a positive and significant effect of both factors on individuals’ SWB at the international level using World Value Survey (WVS) data. This positive correlation exists not only for individual perceptions of trust and democracy but also for the whole country. In the case of Latin American countries, however, Latin Barometer data shows low levels of satisfaction with democracy and trust, while the citizens refer one of the highest levels of SWB in the world. Our objective is to shed light on this Latin American dissociation between the everyday life of the inhabitants and the two-abovementioned institutional factors of the Latin American social environment.
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Notes
- 1.
That is, ordered probit estimations, as in previous literature.
- 2.
Democracy has been defined in so many ways that reaching an agreement on what it is and how to measure it is a very difficult challenge. For further information on these issues, see Coppedge (2012). Trust is one of the three dimensions of social capital. Following Coleman (1988), Bourdieu (1986) and Putnam et al. (1993), most authors agree that the most common empirical indicators of social capital can be grouped into three broad dimensions: trust, networks and social norms (Grootaert & van Bastelaer, 2001; Van Oorschot & Arts, 2005; Portela, et al. 2013; Afandi et al., 2017). The literature on trust distinguishes two types: (a) horizontal trust, also known as interpersonal trust, or trust among people; and (b) vertical trust, also known as political trust, or the trust people have in their governments or political parties (Rothstein & Eek, 2001; Khodyakov, 2007).
- 3.
See Orviska et al., 2014 for further information on the nature of the relationship, if any, between democracy and well-being.
- 4.
Interpersonal trust: country-level mean of value «One can trust most peo-ple» in the variable «Generally speaking, would you say that you can trust most people, or that you can never be too careful when dealing with others?”Trust in government: country-level mean of values «A lot» and «Some» in the variable «How much trust do you have in each of the following institutions? National Government».
- 5.
The mean of the dummy variables indicates the proportion of individuals for which those variables take the value 1.
- 6.
Note that a level-two variable does not have an i subscript because, by definition, its values do not vary from individual to individual within a level-two unit.
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Neira, I., Portela, M., Lacalle-Calderon, M. (2021). The Effects of Democracy and Trust on Subjective Well-Being: A Multilevel Study of Latin American Countries. In: Almakaeva, A., Moreno, A., Wilkes, R. (eds) Social Capital and Subjective Well-Being. Societies and Political Orders in Transition. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75813-4_9
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